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Aaron Seybert Joins Social Investment Practice at The Kresge Foundation

The Kresge Foundation announced that Aaron Seybert has joined the Social Investment Practice as a social investment officer. Kresge’s Social Investment Practice works to strengthen neighborhoods and improve quality of life in America’s cities by deploying capital in the form of debt, equity, guarantees and deposits to further the foundation’s mission and programmatic priorities.

In his new role, Seybert, 35, will lead Kresge’s place-based social investment work in collaboration with the foundation’s Detroit Program and its American Cities Practice. Seybert will identify and build an enhanced social investments pipeline in Detroit and other cities while expanding the foundation’s investments in mixed income/mixed-use and transit-oriented projects nationwide.

Aaron Seybert

“Aaron comes to Kresge with deep, highly varied expertise in transactions that support low-income housing and transit-focused investments,” said Kimberlee R. Cornett, managing director of Kresge’s Social Investment Practice. “The limited availability of tax credit equity and other subsidies available for these projects make these deals markedly more difficult to finance, but increasingly what communities and the public sector desires. Aaron’s mandate is to understand where the investments of capital and capacity need to be made to promote a more robust pipeline of these projects in urban areas including Detroit. It’s a challenging portfolio – and one for which he’s exceedingly well-equipped.”

Seybert joins Kresge as part of an expansion of its Social Investment Practice. In 2015, the foundation’s Board of Trustees approved a $350 million pool of capital to be deployed by 2020 for impact investments, representing approximately 10 percent of the foundation’s corpus.

Most recently, Seybert was an executive director in JPMorgan Chase’s Community Development Banking group where he worked with developers and businesses to structure, underwrite and close federal New Markets Tax Credits and Historic Tax Credit transactions. He was the lead banker on some of JPMorgan Chase's largest tax credit equity investments into social impact projects, including Detroit’s M-1 Rail, the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans and the Salvation Army Kroc Center in Chicago. More recently, Seybert worked as part of the team to design and implement JPMorgan Chase’s $100 million investment in Detroit, overseeing $50 million investments into two local community development financial institutions (CDFIs).

Prior to joining JPMorgan Chase, Seybert served as the assistant vice president for community development at a low-income housing tax credit syndicator and CDFI in Michigan. He is also the co-author of two bills passed in the state of Michigan that protected the tax status of affordable housing developments.

A Michigan native, Seybert earned bachelor’s degrees in accounting and corporate finance from Central Michigan University and a juris doctorate from the Michigan State University College of Law.